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Artvoice Weekly Edition » Issue v5n9 (03/02/2006) » Art

Joanna Raczynzka, media arts curator for Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, organized “Now Again the Past,” an exhibition at least partially inspired by its surroundings. The Carnegie Art Center is a former library, reopened in the past decade as an exhibition space that gives special attention to new media, including video and computer-generated visual art.

Raczynska is originally from Poland, and many of the artists she selected for this exhibit are European, dealing with the “Old World” reforming into a new Europe. The works are political, almost across the board, though some are more subtle than others. They all have ties to methods of reenactment, retelling or reworking histories.

“Berlin Remake” by Annie Siegel retells a history of the city that once was removed from Western Europe. Siegel takes film footage of East Berlin created by East German Film Studio during the segregation of Germany and recasts it beside footage of the contemporary city, the old and the new presented in synchronized video projection. Siegel took a cast and crew to multiple sites, acting as tourists, traversing a once-bleak city which today is colorful and active. Bombed-out and abandoned neighborhoods are now populated and inhabited by new builds, families and young people.

Pia Lindman’s history is broader. Lindman herself is Finnish and lives in New York City. “Lakonikon” shows the artist moving through poses in a gray, prison-like uniform, in front of a gray wall and floor. She is aided as she tries to achieve each position perfectly—positions she borrows from images of people in mourning, drawn from the front page of the New York Times. The removal of individuality onto semi-transparent vellum, which is presented in this exhibit in the form of a book, and next onto a blank video setting, does its best to remove the actual emotion from positions as extreme as someone huddled on the ground. She successfully creates a blank meaningless dictionary, out of context, into which the viewer may place his or her own meaning.

On the other side of the gallery, Felix Gmelin’s “Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II” (Color Test, The Red Flag No. 2), though not a dramatic piece (in terms of theater), is nonetheless nearly an opposite of Lindman’s. Here we have two screens, one shot in 1968 in Berlin and the other shot in 2002 in Stockholm. The artist’s father is one of the performers in the first short film, in which a young man runs through the streets of West Berlin with a red flag to join other youth activists on the balcony of a government building. In Stockholm in 2002, the players are male and female, and the conclusion isn’t as momentous; they don’t find any young activists. This is a sad statement about the political activity of young people around the world in the 21st century. Regardless, the young people in both films charge through the streets with purpose, the large flag flapping in the wind they create. They are not erasing emotion but living it.

Kota Ezawa is German and currently lives in the United States, having completed school in California. His video animation, “Lennon Sontag Beuys,” takes well selected pieces of lectures given by each of the title’s three iconic cultural figures and presents them in direct, four-color animation. The press interviews John Lennon at his bed-in for peace in Amsterdam in 1969. He speaks of “nonviolent passive resistance.” The media scholar and critic Susan Sontag delivers a lecture in 2001 about photography, arguing that as a documentary medium it has created a genre based largely in “suffering and pain” and lacking much of a “moral charge.” Joseph Beuys’ 1974 lecture describes “art coming out of history” and “establishing a conscience.” Ezawa provides us with authority and inspiration, not lecturing himself but asking the viewer to take these words away with them.

Bruce Chefsky’s film, “These Beautiful Ghosts,” recreates the film “Apteka” by Polish artists Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, which was lost and presumed destroyed during the Second World War. Anita Di Bianco’s film “Betty Talks I + II” portrays the actor as activist.

Zach Puff puts footage of presidents Carter, Reagan and Johnson on six television monitors on the floor of the gallery. Their voices come out of microphones and teleprompters surround the installation, titled “Parallel Rhetoric: Coming and Going,” which illustrates the three men’s different approaches to politics.

“Muster,” by Allison Smith of Manassas, Virginia, has the artist sewing flags and devoting them to her beliefs. She artfully remakes the history of war with titles for each flag, such as “Fighting for the Land,” “Control of Masculine Indoctrination” and Fighting for Trench, Art.”

Caroline Koebel, a professor of Media Studies at SUNY at Buffalo, reworks a photograph taken by Viennese activist Peter Weibel in 1968. Weibel was in the original photograph portraying a dog on all fours, led on leash by the artist VALIE EXPORT. Koebel casts media icon Tony Conrad as Weibel, who is led on his knees across an intersection in Buffalo that has seen many accidents. The soundtrack is a sound piece created by Conrad. As the piece concludes, a dog walker comes out and crosses the street, adding a note of comic relief. By choosing a dangerous intersection, Koebel is creating her own activist statement, not just retelling a past action.

Raczynska, the curator, seems to be telling us that as we move forward we are losing valuable histories. She is also telling us to move forward nonetheless, and suggests that we can make more of our actions, our commitments and beliefs. It is essentially a cry for political activism.

“Now Again the Past” remains at the Carnegie Art Center in North Tonawanda (www.carnegieartcenter.org) through March 18. Films that make use of reenactment are being screened at Hallwalls (www.hallwalls.org) on Delaware Avenue throughout the exhibition. “Inextinguishable Fire,” made in 1969 by Harun Farocki, and “What Farocki Taught,” made in 1997 by Jill Godmillow, will be shown this Saturday (March 4) at 8pm. “Culloden,” made in 1964 by Pater Watkins, will be shown on April 1.

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